The category of case (падеж)

Case – the change of a form of a noun to denote grammatical relations to other parts of a sentence.

English nouns denoting living beings (and some nouns denoting lifeless things) have 2 cases, an uniflected form called the common case and inflected for – the genitive (родительный) case.

The genitive case fall under: the Dependent genitive and the absolute genitive.

Dependent Genitive. There are a number of genitive constructions which are classified according to different criterion:

1) dependence:

Dependent: student’s answer. Independent (absolute): “This student’s was the best answer.

2)number of constituents (составляющих)

Single word Genitive: boy’s bike

Double Genitive: “My father’s pipe”

Triple Genitive: brother’s friend’s bride’s hat

Groups Genitive: Prince of Denmark’s kingdom

3) Semantic relations between N’s N:

- possessive Genitive” my son’s bike (My son has a bike)

- agentive (subjective) Genitive: the boy’s applications=>the boy applied

-objective genitive: the boy’s expulsion=>the boy was expelled

-ambiguous genitive: the writer’s invitation (writer invites – subjective. The writer was invited – objective)

-Genitive of origin:: the girl’s story=>the story told by the girl

-descriptive Genitive: a mother’s love

-genitive of destination: children’s room

-genitive of extend: day’s work

-Temporal (временный) genitive: a mitute’s success

-Genitive of measure: the absence of 2 days.

All these synthetic genitive can be replaced by analytical genitives (Francia’s vine – synthetic, Vine of France – analytical form)

Absolute genitive (independent) without noun.

Anaphorical genitive (used instead of a noun and represents the noun previously used to avoid repetition). “Render on (отдавать, воздавать) to Caesar those things which are God’s.

Even the double genititve can be used anophorically. A voice a housekeeper’s husband’s shouted.

The partitive (разделительный) genitive:

An opera of Verdy’s=>one of the Verdy’s opera

The local genitive: I met him at my aunt’s=?at my aunt’s place

 

Lecture 3. Sentence: General

Plan:

1. Syntax: types of syntax

2. Definition of a sentence

3. Classification of a sentence

Syntax studies how words are combined into phrases and simple sentences, how simple sentences are combined into compound (ССП) and complex(СПП) sentences and how supraphrasal (text) units are organized and generated.

The domain of syntax is the syntagmatics of words, phrases and sentences, their arrangement combinability and function.

Types of syntax:

1. Traditional syntax. It’s sentential. It’s primary concerned is a sentence and its grammatical organization.

2. Hypersyntax. It goes beyond the border of the sentence into discourse or text. It studies the structure, generation (порождение текста), cohesion (связь) of discourse (it’s structural semantic and communicative completeness)

3. Pre-suppositional syntax (describes semantic implications (подразумевание). It means that a sentence presupposes another sentence. “Bill is tall but he can’t play basketball” (It’s implied that all tall guys can play basketball. “I rang him, but he was out” (it’s implied that I came to the phone picked up the handset, dilate (?) the number).

4. Logical-semantic syntax. It studies the semantic structure of a sentence which is described in terms of proposition, argument, predicate and a number of deep-cases (падежи с глубоким смыслом о_о). “A hammer broke the window (a hammer – instrumental case). I have the flu (a patient case).”

5. Functional-communicative syntax is concerned with the functional sentence perspective or communicative dynamism. It means distribution of information among the elements of a sentence into given and new information.

6. Paradigmatic syntax. It studies a paradigm of the sentence which is constituted by all possible transformations of a sentence ( when the kernel sentence is transformed we deal with syntactical paradigm). “He has a car/She has a car/She had a car” Al these sentence constitute the paradigm.

7. Structural syntax studied bare structure disregarding ambiguity (двусмысленность) implicit relations and complexity of relations in discourse.

8. Transformational generative syntax. It studies the relations between the surface and deep structures. It operates with transformational analysis. “The invitation of the writer surprises me (the writer invited somebody or writer was invited?)